


The Breaking Dawn

by Walutahanga



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-10 15:26:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2030235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walutahanga/pseuds/Walutahanga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At first Twilight is perfect. Twilight doesn't require them to do anything other than be happy</p>
<p>(A one-shot take on what would have happened if Buffy and Angel had remained in the Twilight dimension during the Season Eight comics. The title is because I couldn't resist.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Breaking Dawn

At first, Twilight is perfect.

Angel and Buffy make love on a white beach before a brilliant sunset. In a field of wildflowers. Beneath a sky of stars. Above a stormy lake. Twilight is malleable, moulding to their every whim, their every unspoken desire. They can spend hours drifting on the cosmos, talking about everything and nothing while stars spin overhead.

Twilight doesn't require them to do anything, other than be happy. 

* * *

Buffy learns to create the past almost by accident. She’s thinking longingly of the Gap when she turns and nearly walks into the smooth glass of a store window. The designer clothes inside sparkle invitingly with their sequins and spiffy sayings, just like in the store back in high school, before it got torched by a vampire gang and turned into a Tescos (yet another reason to hate the agents of darkness).

It’s not a perfect replica, she decides as she walks inside. There’s a sort of glow to it, a hazy like all the hard corners and rough edges got smoothed over. Like when the memory of something is better than the reality.

But that doesn't stop her creating more shops in a flurry of impulsiveness, each one slipping into existence seamlessly. Before she knows it she’s rebuilt Sunnydale, just a little more shiny and wholesome than the reality. There’s the old high school and the library where she spent so many nights, and the Bronze, and the Magic Box, and her mother’s house.

Eventually ( _inevitably_ ) she adds people. Just a few at first. A bartender for the Bronze. Waitresses for restaurants, and shopping attendants for clothes stores. But it’s hard to create someone out of whole cloth. Without the anchor of memory, they keep shifting, changing shape.

So she gives them identities. The bartender becomes an old university lecturer. The students become kids she saw at Dawn’s school, but never spoke to. As she grows bolder, she adds more and more.

* * *

She creates Scott to take her out on a date. They have coffee, and talk about movies, and when he walks her home, he kisses her, gentle and sweet. 

“I never found out what happened to you,” she apologizes. 

“I grew up,” he says, smiling that easy-going way she remembers. Open and effortless and he could have mad her so happy, once upon a time. “It happens to us all.” 

When she takes him up to her room, she feels no guilt, no thought of Angel. This isn’t the real Scott, after all. He shows this in the way he undoes each button, and slides his fingers inside her shirt. There’s no awkwardness, no hesitation. It’s utterly perfect, in the way that only something false can be. Like lollipops, transient sweetness dissolving into nothing.

“And here I was thinking you would be bored without me.”

Buffy sits up to see the familiar figure by the window. She feels a moment of panic, that he won’t understand, won’t like what she’s done. Then she sees Angel’s smile, and remembers. This is their heaven. Nothing is not allowed. 

Angel tilts his head toward Scott.

“Mind if I join in?”

“Of course.”

Angel’s thoughts bleed into hers in a collaborative sort of effect. The light becomes dimmer, warmer. Scott lounges back on the bed, and the ghost of a smirk curves his lips: mocking and defiant. Angel strips off his clothes as he crosses the room to join them and the bed sinks slightly beneath his weight. 

* * *

Buffy creates Willow eventually. No reason. She just wanted to see her face. As harmless as taking a photograph.

She creates Willow’s clothes first – elegant, draping things like something out of a post-modern fairy tale – then her face and red hair. Then the Willow smiles at Buffy, wide and hopeful like how Buffy remembers from high school, and Buffy loses her nerve, letting whole thing collapse into nothing.

It’s another undefined stretch of time – another eternity – before she can build up the courage to create her again. Then Xander. Then Giles. Then Dawn. Then Tara and Anya and Miss Calender and...

Buffy creates scenes from memory, of studying in the library back when everything was so simple, and all she had to worry about was patrolling the local cemetery and passing math. Or partying at the Bronze, feeling Angel’s eyes on her from a dark corner and knowing she was the only girl in the room for him. 

* * *

One scene she plans very carefully, building the house bit by bit, trying to remember the exact way the porch joins onto the steps, or which colour teapot went in the third cupboard in the kitchen. When she’s done, she stands outside and wipes suddenly damp hands on her skirt. She opens the door and steps inside.

“Hello?”

Her mother looks up from the book she’s reading on the sofa. 

“You’re home early. Is everything alright?”

“No. I mean yes, everything’s fine.” Buffy dumps her bookbag on the ground and comes over to sit down, resting her head in her mother’s lap. She smells of safety and home and everything good. “Everything’s perfect.”

Her mother’s hand strokes her hair, absently and oh-so-familiar. Buffy closes her eyes and wills this moment never to end. But this one doesn’t have to. This one will last as long as she wants it to, and she will always be able to come back.

* * *

Angel has his own private entertainments. Buffy supposes he spends his time in LA, or the Ireland of his youth, or whatever places he was happy during the times he had a soul. 

Once, when she goes looking for him, she finds him standing on a cliff beneath the star-studded night sky, talking to a dark-haired woman in a white dress. The woman, who is facing away from Buffy, has her hand to his cheek and is shaking her head. Buffy can see Angel’s expression; sad and a little bit angry at the same time. Buffy feels a strange little lurch in her stomach; a premonition of danger she vaguely remembers from before Twilight.

The woman disappears, leaving only the cliff and the night sky, and Angel smiles at Buffy.

“Hello, lover.”

She’s relieved by the disappearance of that other expression, the one that wasn’t happy, and didn’t fit with the Twilight. But she still asks;

“Who was that?”

“Nothing. Just a moment I wanted to fix.”

Buffy understands. She’s fixed her share of moments, re-enacted them the way they should have gone. Made Willow braver, Xander less dorky. She’s tackled Warren before he could fire the gun, and been in time to save Miss Calender. She’s made Faith happy and Jesse live. She’s taken her mother to the hospital the day before the aneurism, and been there to greet her when she comes out of surgery.

“And did you?” She asks.

“I tried.”

Then Angel sweeps his hand, and her jeans and top become a blue silk dress from a hundred years ago. A waltz starts, and Angel in a tuxedo sweeps her away into a swirling midst of dancers. She forgets, caught up in the warmth of his hand resting in the middle of her back, and his steps guiding hers through the dance. 

* * *

When she starts creating lovers again, she doesn't tell Angel.

Not that he'd mind, she quickly assures herself - he hadn't cared when she created Scott - it's just none of his business. Like the time spent with her mother, this belongs to her and her alone. 

(She deliberately doesn't think about the difference between sharing a sexy fantasy of a boy she dated briefly in high school and creating a perfect replica of her college boyfriend to screw her senseless inside an army helicopter leaving Sunnydale.)

She finds meticulous pleasure in re-walking the steps of her various relationships. She erases her misunderstandings with Riley and is in time to catch him before he leaves. She returns teenage Xander's flirtations, resulting in a sweet high school romance. She asks for a second date with Robin Wood. She kisses Faith after a stake-out in the cemetery. She tries to smooth out the knotted snarl of her relationship with Spike, and eventually gives up with a frustrated laugh; where Spike is concerned, every bit of progress between them only came with pain. 

There is a sweet kind of pain to living out her possibilities, and she never notices (not once) that the only possibility she doesn't try to re-live is Angel. 

* * *

Much later – a hundred lives later and none at all – she’s sitting in a jazz bar, nursing something sweet and alcoholic. On stage a demon with green skin and red horns is playing something beautiful and mournful on an old piano.

“Here’s the thing about dreams, doll,” he says. “You always have to wake up in the end.”

“That’s very negative,” Buffy says disapprovingly. She thinks he must be Angel’s fantasy. She’s sure she’d remember if he was hers.

“Not always, darling.” The demon’s fingers slide over the keys, and the music is so sad, that Buffy could cry. “Even the nicest of dreams all wear out their welcome eventually. Just like my home dimension – a nice place to visit, but no way in heck am I ever going to live there.”

Buffy has the feeling she should not be listening, but is unable to break away from the hypnotic rhythm of his voice. 

“I don’t want to hear this,” she says, hearing the peevishness of her voice. “Do something else. Sing me something.”

“Your wish is my command.”

The song is in a language she doesn’t know, about places she’s never visited, and people she’s never met. She finds herself crying for the first time since coming to Twilight, her tears becoming a shining river that snakes away through the floorboards. Angel comes in toward the end and stands behind Buffy, his hands on her shoulders.

“I saw you jump,” he says, and Buffy thinks he’s talking to her until the demon answers;

“The centre cannot hold.” He smiles, sad and distant. “Not even for you, Angel-cakes.”

Buffy is glad when the jazz bar disappears, taking the demon with it.

She turns to Angel and kisses him, suddenly desperate for his touch. He kisses her back, equally desperate.

Their clothes melt away and they sink naked into the lush green grass of a meadow. She urges him on, with ragged words, and hands and mouth. The scenery flickers around them, almost at random.

Finally it settles on a darkened room and a bed draped with red velvet. Familiar enough to send a shudder of excitement and foreboding through her gut.

“Buffy…” Angel says, and she hears both arousal and anxiety in her name. “Buffy…”

“Angel,” she whispers firmly, and silences him with a kiss.

They’ve never done this before, despite all the times they’ve made love since coming to Twilight. Some instinct has held them both back from re-enacting this particular moment, like refraining from touching a hot stove after being burned. Because Twilight is perfect, and this particular perfection was ( _is_ ) dangerous.

But Buffy is tired of holding back, of avoiding what neither of them can talk about. She _wants_ , and this is her heaven; nothing is not allowed.

About them, the candle flames flicker in their waxen cradles.  Their discarded clothes are wet from the sewer, and running from the Judge. Angel’s skin is cool against her heat, his touch certain and reverent. When they come, it’s exactly as Buffy remembers, a single perfect note ending an aria. They lie gasping in the wake of their joining, and wait.

And wait.

It might be hours or minutes later when Buffy whispers against his skin.

“I’m not your perfect happiness.”

Angel shivers, and doesn’t answer. The red velvet and darkened room melt away, becoming the crisp white sheets and dinghy walls of an old hotel room. There are voices muffled in the next room, rising in a squabble over the last doughnut, and an English accented voice asking everyone to please focus.

“No,” Angel breathes in Buffy’s ear. “No.”

But whether it was denial or agreement, she could not say.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to the fourth book of the Twilight book series, which shares a name with the villain of Season Eight. It also refers to Buffy's dawning realization that a) she and Angel have grown apart from the perfect soulmates they once were, and b) that Twilight is not all it's cracked up to be.
> 
> Also, in case you didn't pick it, the woman on the cliff is Cordelia, at the rendezvous she and Angel never got to make at the end of Ats Season 3, and the green demon is Lorne, post-heroic sacrifice in the comics "Music of the Spheres". They're both technically ascended beings at this point, so what Buffy is seeing might not be projections at all.


End file.
